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12/15 Daily Bears Report: Waiting on Yu

By Mark C. Moore


For those that don't know, I am an avid follower of the Texas Rangers. LoneStarBall.com, the SBNation site for the Rangers, is actually how I became associated with SBNation and its network of blogs. Recently, a Japanese pitcher by the name of Yu Darvish was posted by his Japanese team for what is basically a transfer to MLB and a team here in the US. Teams were given 4 days to submit a sealed bid if they so chose, and yesterday at 4:00 PM CST was the deadline for the submission of bids. We don't know anything yet about who will win the right to negotiate with Darvish (at least nothing concrete), but I obviously hope the Rangers do because it's not my money and I'm almost certainly irrational when it comes to elite talent acquisition. Anyway, that's what I've been doing at least in part for the last 19 hours or so. Last night I actually spent several hours following Japanese bloggers and reporters on twitter, translating their tweets to English online, and trying to decipher from the horrible online translations what they actually meant or knew. Obsession is probably an understatement at this point, but I think we knew that since I run a blog about Baylor athletics.

On that note, this is a Baylor blog after all and we've got links ahead!

"What has happened at Baylor," says Texas coach Mack Brown, "is a terrific story for all of college football."

This is a little awkward now, Mack, because I've spent a lot of energy hating you over the years. Don't make this harder than it has to be.

"You gotta have a plan, but realize that plans don’t always work out. Plan B is the NFL," Griffin says. "Whenever you ask me what are my plans, the first thing that comes out of my mouth is not to be an NFL player. I want to go to law school, I want to be a lawyer, maybe a sports agent. That’s the plan. All of that other stuff doesn’t matter until I’m done here at Baylor."

Take from that what you will. I am going to try to hide my excitement about what "until I'm done here at Baylor" means.

The biggest news in college football yesterday was arguably the resignation of Pitt HC Todd Graham (formerly of Rice and Tulsa) so he could take the job at Arizona State. This story wouldn't be that noteworthy except for three things: 1) he supposedly sought out the ASU job and asked his AD at Pitt if he could interview for it, 2) he resigned about three hours after being denied permission to do so, and 3) (biggest of all) told his AD and players that he was leaving through a text message. I posted that message yesterday. It is douchetastic. Several of his players absolutely flipped out on twitter and they should have. They were lied to by a guy that up until yesterday told them he was committed to Pitt wholeheartedly.

I don't expect that coaches are going to be loyal in the true sense of the word; they are basically mercenaries by definition. I do expect that coaches will handle themselves with at least a modicum of class and professionalism when they decide eventually to change jobs, though. (My expectations are basically meaningless, but still). Todd Graham didn't do that yesterday, and if you dig a little deeper into what people have said about him in the past, he hasn't done that before. From what I can tell, Graham has never left a job amicably. He uses excuses like wanting to be closer to his family to move from Rice to Pittsburgh and then now again from Pittsburgh to Arizona. The Grahams must breed like rabbits and fan out like Bedouins. During his press conference at ASU yesterday evening, he called it his "dream job." This is a guy that was coaching HS football in Texas just a few years ago. Arizona State was his dream job? The only dream this guy cares about is his next one. Just last year (when he took the Pitt job) "I've spent my whole life working to get this job. This is the best job I've ever had." (that quote is from Mark Schlabach's column today at ESPN.com where he rightly skewered Graham alive).

I feel bad for Arizona State fans just like I feel bad for Kansas fans. Your AD got in over his head, browbeaten by his alumni into not hiring a coach he should have hired (June Jones from SMU), and then had to settle for a coach in Todd Graham who went 6-6 this year at Pitt. You just fired Dennis Erickson for doing the same thing in a tougher conference. And now you have a guy that one day after he quit his previous dream job to take another dream job that he'll probably quit for an even better job (assuming he doesn't fall flat on his face, which is certainly possible) talked about honor, commitment, and integrity and how he'll sell ASU to recruits and fans. He's going to sell things he almost certainly does not have. And ASU is going to pay him a lot of money to do it. How is this a good idea?

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